I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market, and expect to graduate in May 2027. I research topics at the intersection of housing economics, urban economics, public economics, and risk and insurance.
Before graduate school, I was a research assistant in the Regional Analysis Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. I received my B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019.
Job Market Paper
Sorting Over Wildfire Risk Information (with Sarah Bass)
Abstract
We study how information about climate risk changes household beliefs, housing demand, and residential sorting in equilibrium. We use the introduction of a wildfire risk disclosure policy in California as a shock to beliefs about wildfire risk that leaves the underlying physical hazard unchanged, allowing us to identify how changes in beliefs affect location choices and housing prices. We embed a Bayesian model of belief updating in a structural model of neighborhood choice in which households have heterogeneous preferences over housing prices and wildfire risk. Our estimates indicate that before the policy, households held diffuse beliefs about neighborhood wildfire risk, and disclosure widened the gap in believed annual burn probability between disclosed and non-disclosed neighborhoods by 0.47 percentage points. Counterfactual simulations that remove the policy show that this change in beliefs re-sorts households by their sensitivity to wildfire risk: mortgage-financed buyers of primary homes, the most risk-sensitive group, shift away from disclosed neighborhoods, while buyers of non-primary homes, especially cash buyers, move in, and prices in disclosed neighborhoods fall relative to non-disclosed neighborhoods. Relative to the no-disclosure counterfactual, the gap in average annual fire exposure between the neighborhoods chosen by cash buyers of non-primary homes and mortgage-financed buyers of primary homes, from the year of purchase through 2023, increases by 29%. Alternative counterfactual exercises show that a finer-grained risk score could achieve a similar or larger reallocation of risk with substantially less household re-sorting. Our findings show that information can reshape beliefs about wildfire risk, housing market outcomes, and the incidence of wildfire exposure, even when the underlying physical hazard is unchanged.